Psych-cess Webinar Recordings

We have made all past PRMS Psych-cess webinar recordings available on our website at http://www.prms.com/Psych-cess. Topics for past webinars, which are geared towards your resident, fellow, and early career psychiatrist members, include career advice, risk management, and child and adolescent, forensic, and emergency psychiatry. Future event dates will be announced soon – one can sign up to be notified of upcoming dates on the Psych-cess webpage, below the recordings.

May 22: PRMS/SPA New Orleans Reception

We cannot believe that we are less than two weeks away from our Annual Reception on Sunday, May 22, in New Orleans. If you are attending the Annual Meeting, please stop by The Chicory from 6 - 9 pm CT to say hello and enjoy sips, snacks, and live music. We have missed seeing everyone and look forward to catching up in person! Family and friends are always welcome. Please RSVP here.

PRMS Blogs

This May in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, PRMS is honored to support two national organizations advocating for mental health of children and youth in our communities, Child Mind Institute and The Trevor Project. Learn more about each organization and how to support them in our latest blog post here.

We are also pleased to announce that Janet Baek, MD, is the new PRMS Fellow in Child Psychiatry with the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP). Meet Dr. Baek and read about her goals during the fellowship in her guest blog piece.

May Fact vs. Fiction Resource

Your longtime psychotherapy patient is moving out of state.  The patient is doing very well and is on no psychiatric medications.  You check on the patient’s new state and find there is no applicable exception to licensure, so you resign yourself to having to choose between terminating treatment with this patient or getting licensed in the patient’s new state.  You have a fleeting thought that since you are not prescribing medications, not even non-controlled substances, you should not need to worry about licensure requirements in the patient’s state.  You then decide that since psychotherapy is the practice of medicine, you need to comply with licensure requirements, so you start the arduous process of applying.

What do you think - fact or fiction?

ANSWER: Fact!

You do need to comply with the licensure requirements of the patient’s state (as well as your own, if different).  While some states have exceptions to full licensure, such as a telemedicine license, or not requiring a license for very few contacts with the patient in the state, most states require full licensure.  And this is true regardless of whether medications are prescribed.  However, your compliance with the patient’s state licensing requirements may not be sufficient to allow you to prescribe controlled substances to that out-of-state patient.
 
In the event you need to prescribe controlled substances to patients in a different state, keep in mind that once the federal Public Health Emergency (PHE) ends, the DEA will likely go back to requiring a DEA registration in both your state and the patient’s state, if different.  (This is a long-standing requirement that existed prior to the pandemic, but enforcement was temporarily waived by the DEA for the duration of the PHE.)  This may be problematic because, in addition to requiring a license in the patient’s state, the DEA also generally requires a practice address in the patient’s state to issue the DEA registration.  Remember that controlled substances are in a closed system with the DEA responsible for tracking them from manufacture to prescribing, and unannounced visits to prescribers’ practice locations currently remain a part of this process.  Prior to paying the significant non-refundable fee for a DEA registration in another state, consider seeking confirmation from the DEA that it is needed and can be obtained without a practice address.  Here is contact information for assistance with DEA registrations.